Home

I wasn’t bothered the first time I saw my mother go through the suitcase of a maid that was leaving. “Suitcase” is perhaps an overstatement for the bunch of rags the woman carried in her hand. At eight years old, I peeked at the exchange from behind a couch. The maid slowly took out her belongings one by one: shirts, pajamas, underwear. My mom looked at me, saying, “She could be taking something.” Three women in a small room and an act of humiliation that still weighs on me: my own mother against the weakest person imaginable, a pregnant maid, who was leaving for good.

These days it seems journalists have become less popular than lawyers. The widespread perception of journalism is that it is a field full of pedantic windbags and hacks with hidden agendas. For anyone who might be looking for evidence there is such a thing as a journalist with something mind-expanding to say, whose work is potentially as life-changing as a great film or novel, I recommend Ryszard Kapuscinski. His books might serve to dissuade journalist-haters from their blanket dismissal of our kind, the scribbling tribe. 

Throughout the 1990s, the Bolivian women’s movement was ideologically polarized between a liberal, NGO-based “gender technocracy” and the anarcha-feminism embodied in the Mujeres Creando (Women Creating) movement. Between them stood the great majority of the country’s female population—a huge contingent of women of indigenous descent living in a colonized condition. Neither the technocratic nor the anarchist tendency considered them the subject of political representation.

“An island surrounded by land” is how novelist Roa Bastos described his native Paraguay, as much in reference to its political and social insularity, as to its landlocked geography. With less than seven million people in an area about the size of California, Paraguay is considered by some to be South America’s so-called “Empty Quarter.” The country’s eccentricity leaves many outsiders puzzled or uninterested.